Wanker: Hiatt

Atrios has Fred Hiatt at #2, securing Tom Friedman the top spot for sure. It brought to mind my own retrospective (in 2006!!!) of Hiatt wankery. Here's my favorite part of it and particularly telling in the age of the Radical Roberts Court:

Fred Hiatt's Washington Post Editorial Board, in a move that could surprise no one who is familiar with its Bush loving ways, urged the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito the other day. What was particularly funny and indicative of just how in the tank Hiatt and Co. are was their straight from the GOP talking points invocation of Alito's "judicial modesty":

Humility is called for when predicting how a Supreme Court nominee will vote on key issues, or even what those issues will be, given how people and issues evolve. But it's fair to guess that Judge Alito will favor a judiciary that exercises restraint and does not substitute its judgment for that of the political branches in areas of their competence. That's not all bad. The Supreme Court sports a great range of ideological diversity but less disagreement about the scope of proper judicial power. The institutional self-discipline and modesty that both Judge Alito and Chief Justice Roberts profess could do the court good if taken seriously and applied apolitically. [..][Emphasis supplied.]

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My gawd, what a record of wankery. Sorry, I know Tom Friedman seems a worthy choice, but no, Fred Hiatt was the Wanker of the Decade.

I hear a conservative whine about the "liberal media" i just laugh. I ask them have you forgotten all the love notes they made to George W. Bush??? I think the whine is so ingrained in their brains that it has turned their brains into mush.

... honorable mention for Cokie Roberts, or at least a shout-out, for her mindlessly elitist Aug. 2008 characterization of Barack Obama's home state of Hawaii (and mine) in August 2008 as "a foreign, exotic place" on ABC's This Weekwith George Stephanopolous. In the face of initial vociferous criticism, Roberts doubled down on stupid, further criticizing Obama on NPR the very next day for vacationing out here: "He should be at Myrtle Beach."

... the Atlantic coast, I suppose Myrtle Beach would have its charms, as would probably other similar resort destinations like St. Simon's Island, GA or Daytona Beach, FL -- but if I'm going to visit the Southern coast, I'd rather go to Charleston and Savannah. I find those two cities to be fascinating.

And I have to admit, the respective roles that both cities played in the antebellum South's slave-based agrarian economy is something that's always fascinated me.

The collectively defiant attitudes of Charleston's citizenry with regards to the issue of human trafficking and slavery served only to further inflame and harden public opinion in the Northern states against the old South. In that regard, the white South Carolinians' own arrogance served to blind them to the fact that they were courting their own inevitable destruction.

The asinine assault on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor by Confederate forces under the command of Gen. Pierre Beauregard -- 151 years ago this very week -- sealed the South's ultimate doom, by casting the Confederacy as the initial aggressor in what remains our bloodiest conflict. The federal post was already under tight blockade, and its U.S. Army garrison would've been compelled to surrender within a couple of weeks as the last of its provisions ran out. It was a needless act of Dixie hubris, as though they just couldn't help themselves.

I really do appreciate your feelings about the antebellum slave trade, which is a true blight on American history and something that we may never be able to live down. It's an emotionally gutwrenching issue that led directly to our nation's penultimate defining moment, the U.S. Civil War, of which we're still feeling its impact and ramifications 150 years afterward.

But nevertheless, what's done is done, and we can't turn back the clock or whitewash the past. We can only learn from history, as a means to not repeat our forefathers' errors as we go forward.